Wireless devices, such as cellular telephones, and Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) communicators are gaining widespread acceptance. In order to be competitive in the marketplace and to meet consumer demand, service providers continue to offer an ever expanding array of services and features. Current generations of PDAs incorporate many features including cellular phone service.
PDAs are hand-held computers originally designed for use as personal organizers for storing notes, contact information, calendar dates and so forth. The current generation of PDAs additionally incorporate wireless and cellular technology and act as a phone for voice communications as well as allows users to access a variety of information and include services and features such as internet browsing, access to driving directions, instant stock quotes, entertainment locators, email service, and a variety of multi-media and video capabilities, to name a few.
First generation PDAs had the ability to synchronize or “sync” with the user's personal computer (e.g. desktop PC or laptop) for such things as downloading/uploading calendar information, personal phonebooks, text and other multi-media files. Such sync information is of course static in the sense that it is not automatically updated. More recently, wireless PDAs having Internet browser capabilities are more dynamic in nature and, in addition to syncing with the user's PC can also link to text-only web sites or web sites specifically developed for PDA browsers. A user typically subscribes to a service provider to provide these dynamic wireless services.
Traditionally, wireless devices such as cell phones or PDA communicators, more generally referred to as wireless clients, come pre-configured with built-in features that are already active and paid for. In the alternative, they can be enhanced later via purchases of specific software, requiring manual installation, a vendor site visit, or even a unit replacement. These methods may be disadvantageous for the customer as they must make up-front purchase decisions for features with which they may not have had adequate opportunity to evaluate or they must take responsibility for installation themselves. In the latter case the customer may not fully understand the vagaries of optimizing the capabilities and thus encounter technical problems. These traditional methods also cause difficulties for the vendors or service providers since they are challenged with the task of selling unevaluated features to the customer up front. Of course this is often a difficult sell.
Various schemes have been offered to efficiently manage wireless clients. For example, a paper by Syd Issaq, “Approaches to End-User Device Management”, Mres Telecommunications, UCL, London Communications Symposium, Jul. 26–27, 1999, discusses various types of wireless clients (end-user devices) that have some stored program logic embedded within them. This paper also considers management interfaces that can be used to manage and control the devices remotely. As shown in FIG. 1, and discussed by Issaq, manager applications 100 send operation requests to an Agent application 102 within the managed devices. Within these devices, manageable resources are modeled by Managed Objects (MOs) 104, which represent a standardized definition of a particular type of network component, or resource. These MOs are said to encapsulate the underlying resources, and offer an abstract interface at their boundaries for management operations to be performed. These MOs may also emit notifications when some internal or external event affecting the object is detected.
However, the above mentioned management scheme involves remote management of embedded software loaded on the wireless clients by the service provider. A system for managing features of wireless clients that does not involve intervention of the remote service provider would be desirable.